Ridiculously Excited

9 years ago

We're still in the design process on our new house, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time already stressing out about my hatred for recessed lighting, particularly in the kitchen. My husband wants 10' ceilings throughout the house, and the current kitchen plan includes a barrel-vaulted ceiling, so I could just see the whole lighting issue coming at me from every direction. To make matters worse, we're trying to build as green as possible, and I detest the light generated by most LED fixtures.

I've been driving myself nuts with various options to avoid the ceiling cans, and trying to figure out how to accomplish ambient room light and adequate task lighting without stuffing a zillion sconces and pendants into the space. Almost everyone I know who's ever built a house says that picking the lighting was one of the most difficult things they had to do - I think my sister-in-law exchanged at least a dozen fixtures because they weren't right.

I stumbled upon a news article about a Swiss company called Ribag - they've been working on developing these really cool OLED ceiling fixtures, and announced they'd be offering a line of them for sale this coming fall. The OLED lights are supposed to be much closer to "natural" daylight than regular LEDs; they don't get hot, and they're cutting-edge in terms of efficiency. The fixtures with a control feature can be dimmed just by waving your arm. No idea how much these will retail for, but I sure hope I can squeeze some money in the budget for a few of them for ambient lighting if they're as good as they sound.

I'm not flying to Switzerland to see them in action, so some retailer had better bring them to the US. I want to find out if these are my holy grail of kitchen lights or not.

Here is a link that might be useful: Ribag Oviso OLED lighting

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Comments (5)

Terri_PacNW
9 years ago
They do look and sound cool.
thepeppermintleaf
9 years ago
There are a lot of LED lights now which are a 'warm' white as opposed to a 'cool' white (which has a bluish tint which many negatively associate w/ LEDs). We put a lot of cans in the kitchen we're building, because I like them and they give great light. We are buying the bulbs for those from home depot. HD has displays which show the different color temperatures of the LED bulbs they have. The prices have really come down a lot recently!

DH and I own an online LED company and we sell flexible LED strips so we will (of course) be using them in our kitchen for undercabinet lighting, and in our stacked upper cabinets which have glass doors. You can also put LED strips above your cabinets (if they don't go to the ceiling), underneath toekicks, or under countertop overhangs for additional indirect lighting. Depending how your ceiling is designed, you can add strips above crown molding to lighten up the ceiling. We sell 4x types of white LEDs - a warm white (similar to regular incandescent- a yellowish, warm feel) 2400-2600K, a natural white 2900-3200K, daylight white 4000-4500 K, and pure white (not bluish, but does not have any warmth) 4700-5300K.

LED strips above kitchen cabinets for ambient lighting (sorry I haven't been able to get a picture of this at night yet- this is a friend's house).-
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Kenanthompson
9 years ago
The LED bulbs look really cool!
oldbat2be
9 years ago
Not ridiculous, nothing more fun than the perfect lighting!!

Neat product and I love the table lamp. Please let us know pricing when you find out.

We've invested a ton in LED lighting and then struggled with dimming sufficiently. In a few places, I love it. In others, I feel it's too harsh.

When you said barrel ceiling, it made me think of using something like the Tech Lighting Kable Lite system. We have this in our family room, with the k-hello heads.

These used to be lots of pictures in their gallery of wonderful vaulted ceilings with cable lighting, but I'm not seeing them.

This is from their website:

Here is a link that might be useful: Tech Lighting
thepeppermintleaf
9 years ago
oldbat2be- What types of lights do you have and how are they wired? LEDS should be able to be dimmed similar to other lights, but done in a different way. They either need a special controller/dimmer which can dim them with PWM (pulse width modulation, turning the LEDs on and off slower to create the dimming effect), or they need to be hooked up to a dimmable power supply (usually the LEDs are 12V/24V) and then they can be controlled through the 120V dimmer with which the power supply is connected.